Content Warning: sexism, rape

This past weekend I decided to watch a horror flick from the 1970s to get a feel for the era because I’m writing up a gothpunk story that will hold a darker version of that decade’s aesthetic. Looking down a search list (‘1970s horror’) on Amazon Prime, I settled on The Fifth Floor, a film from 1978 starring Dianne Hull and Robert Englund. You know, the guy who would later become Freddy Kruger.

Right from the opening it hit me with the tag line, This Film Is Based Upon A True Story. I pondered why they chose ‘upon’ rather than ‘on’ as we would normally see these days while debating if I wanted to get into ‘real life’ or find something more monstrous, supernatural. Eh, I just kept on watching.

After the fun disco intro, the main character Kelly came on screen and things got horrific. So, the basic plot is Kelly is young and working her way through college as a disco dancer. She hangs out, takes a drink, and then suffers a seizure. Strychnine was in her drink, the court deems her psychologically unsound and sentences her to 90 days in a psych ward. They think she tried to commit suicide. In public. In a bar. While having a good time.

Yep. Someone spiked her drink, and she gets accused of being crazy. What followed was her desperate attempt to convince people on the inside of her sanity.

But that horror, as bad as it was, represented the beginning. Enter one of the caretakers of the Fifth Floor facility, Carl (played by Bo Hopkins). Carl is as cringe as it gets, and when Kelly freaks out and is told to calm down by taking a shower, well…

It’s during that scene that Carl shows the viewer what he’s all about, and instantly horror movie music kicks in. And rightly so. I think for a low budget film this is the best horror music pop up ever, in an incredibly disturbing scene of personal violation. And it gets worse later on as the movie proceeded at a good pace with Kelly trying to help other inmates while repeatedly trying and failing to escape.

But this flick was horrific. Not just because of multiple sexual assaults, but the strange, uncomfortable way in which a film trying to show you abuse of power against a woman keeps showing damn near every inch of her body. I mean, you can talk about SA without being so revealing. It felt like a peek into this world behind closed doors and exploitation all at once.

But isn’t that a horror staple? That the victim is primarily a woman, and the crime, no matter how savage or literally bloodthirsty, is also fetishized and violated. A lot of horror fans can shrug it off, because, after all, it isn’t real. This is supposedly based on someone’s life, or many people, or just scary tales coming out of sanitariums. Rape, electroshock ‘therapy,’ inmates committing suicide because there’s no escape, etc.

But again, usually women. I’m not saying men don’t become victims in horror, they do. And I’m far from an expert or in a position to give the kind of nuanced talk on sexism and SA in film, but I do think about these things as a flick rolls on, and wonder if horror is sometimes used as soft pornography.

Now that I’ve shown you I’m a prude, on the other hand I have an incredibly high tolerance in horror for bloodshed, gore, violence, screaming, hopelessness and bad endings. I can watch those with a straight face. But SA and exploitation is my line. I watched the entire film, I thought it was actually good. But it was the most disturbing thing I’d seen in some time. Instead of thinking on my story or how 1970s horror films were different than what came before or after, I ended up on WTF is going on with sexism in horror.

Yes, maybe because I’m heterom Ace and had my own violations in childhood that this thing makes me get weirded out. But I feel that, if a film is discussing the horror of SA, then the story will show it. But when the main character (who we root for) is over-sexualized then it’s a double horror as she is being done so again except it’s by the film and director, studio, and so on. And what’s the lesson there? Or do they not think we should see one.

Right after that I found out Zombie (1979), the Luigi Fulci classic, was on Shudder. I always wanted to see it, and hopped over to press play. It’s a masterful film and one of the goriest out there, the zombies are the best I’ve ever seen and the biting off of flesh is also very realistic. It also has an incredible doom and gloom plot. However, I couldn’t help but notice that on the boat, when Susan (played by Auretta Gay) goes diving, she wears a bikini bottom, but no top. It was a whole scene of one guy just gawking at her (with close up shots of her crotch). Later there’s a nude shower scene before a very hideous, slow death scene.

This is by far not the first time I noticed this, but it does bring home a certain specific sticking point in horror. That point being a woman is but a flimsy damsel, a sexualized victim in waiting for the often male monster(s) to prey upon. Yes, when we see one guy oogling a half naked woman like in Zombie the film could be also making a side statement about human beings being monsters too, or that they’re ‘not perfect’. They are. But also, WTF.

You could almost think that the violence, the macho male heroes surviving all odds was enough to satisfy any man watching these films. But I guess not. I feel the story should tell the horror.

Yes, I know. But the same movie will show a zombie rip out someone’s guts. However, we rarely see that happen to someone, and it isn’t often their body, but a dummy and some gross physical effects. Exploitation of a woman’s body is there for as long as the film lasts, and serves no real purpose other than to further indoctrinate male gaze. I know I tend to be in the minority about this, but that’s where my brain went over the weekend. I suppose this is more of a rant than an intellectual look into the genre, but there it is.

What do you think? Is this an overreaction, or do you agree, or just don’t think about it?

For me, I’ll continue exploring the decade of the 70s in horror, and am open to recommendations. Hopefully less exploitative ones, though I know that decade was not so kind in this regard.